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Jethro shares today's build-in-public update: testing a "gauntlet loop" approach for AI-assisted game development after hearing about similar workflows being used to create Call of Duty-style projects. He started the project in Claude Code, hit token limits, and then moved work over to Grok and Codex subagents to keep the build moving.
The big takeaway is that AI coding is powerful, but it still is not truly hands-off. Even with a PRD and a hoped-for one-shot workflow, the process required repeated check-ins, course correction, and supervision. The game is now running in the simulator, with the next step being a real-device test on Jethro's phone.
In this show, we share the struggles and challenges of growing and building stuff.
[00:00:00.20] Jethro Jones: Ok, so today I've been, this is Jethro Jones by the way, today I've been hearing about this gauntlet loop that somebody used to create Call of Duty. So I fired up my Claude Code and had it start working on this. I actually started it last night so it could work overnight, and it started working, and of course I ran out of tokens, because I'm only on the $20 a month plan, but I figured I could just keep it going. Once it ran out of tokens, because it was doing subagents in Claude, I switched to doing subagents in Grok and Codex, which I have bigger accounts with, and I built a game for the iPhone and iPad, and it actually worked. The thing that's really interesting is people have these, you know, they say they do all this stuff and like they turn on and let it go. Man, I cannot do that because this thing like Claude stops and it has to wax poetic about how it feels about everything and say, "Oh, here's something that I missed," and then instead of just recognizing that it made a mistake, then it just says, "I missed this, and so now here's a problem I want to make sure I let you know about it." And it's so frustrating. So anyway, I wanted it to be a one-shot, and I even gave it like a PRD to make sure that it would be able to get through it all, but it could not do that. So I've been checking in a bunch trying to figure out how to make it work and all that, and it's just taking a lot of checking in, but I'm not making any changes myself. I'm making the AI do it all. So as of right now, this one is, I think it's just about ready because I played it in the simulator. So I'm going to figure out how to put it on my phone next and see what it can do and then go from there. So that's been my big project today, and hopefully this will be an app that I can actually release fairly soon. I'll keep you posted.